Dedicated Independent Reflection Time

Dedicated Independent Reflection Time or Dedicated Improvement Reflection Time is, well, exactly that. Time given to the students to do nothing else but to reflect on their progress and consider how to improve and where to go next.

It is something that I first came across from blogger Hunting English.

How I use DIRT in Drama Key Stage 4 lessons.

When I am doing any sort of long rehearsal led period of lessons, which as I do AQA GCSE Drama we do a lot, I use a combination of DIRT and Post-It Note Feedback to lead the content of the lessons.

The students start by reviewing the Post-It Note Feedback from the previous lesson using. Post-It Note Feedback can come from anybody in the classroom, from the students themselves, from their peers or from me, the teacher. The student reviews the feedback, selects the most relevant or urgent and completes the first box on the DIRT sheet.

The students then go into their groups ready to rehearse and complete the Target Setting Sheet for that lesson. Onto that Target Setting Sheet goes targets for group improvement as well as individual improvements as suggested from the Post-It Note Feedback. This document provides the students with a guide to what they are doing in that lesson, they can tick items off once they have done them and review their progress towards the targets in the middle of the lesson. Therefore it is also pretty good evidence to observers of what the students are doing and how much progress they are making.

At the end of the lesson we do some sort of sharing, providing more Post-It Note Feedback for next lesson, and then complete the rest of the DIRT sheet. The students are asked to reflect on what worked well in the lesson, what work still needs improving and what work they have improved in the lesson.

I accompany each DIRT sheet with a generic drama key word list and encourage the students to write short answers in the style of the Unit 1 written exam, so that they get used to writing using the correct terminology and the sentence structure needed for the exam.

Here is the example I give to the students:

How I use DIRT in Drama Key Stage 3 lessons.

The use of DIRT in Key Stage 3 is a much more low key affair, however we begin to use it from the very beginning of Year 7 so that the students are used to writing and reflecting on their practical work. At Key Stage 3 the DIRT sheet is one half of an A4 piece of paper and given to them in a book format. The reflection occurs at the end of the lesson and instead of covering all of the areas that the Key Stage 4 sheet does, the students are just required to look at one area – such as describing your work or evaluating your work. Key Stage 3 students have less time in their lesson and they don’t want the focus of their work to be too heavily towards the written work, so I just spent the final 5 minutes working on the DIRT books.

All resources are free to download on TES:

• DIRT Sheet (Targeted towards Key Stage 4)
• Drama Group Target Sheet
• Big Generic Drama Keyword List
• DIRT Sheet 2 (Targeted towards Key Stage 3)